I omitted the egg from this nastar style pineapple tart recipe , and made an enclosed version this year. On hindsight, I should have give them a bright orange eggwash like this, mine are looking way too plain.  But this pastry, once again, pass my kids’ taste test with flying colors.

PINEAPPLE TARTS
// Adapted from A Spoonful Of Sugah
// Yields 27 tarts

170g plain flour
10g corn flour
1 tablespoon icing sugar
125g cold salted butter, cubed
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
1 tablespoon fresh milk, cold
½ serving of this homemade pineapple jam**

METHOD

01. Sieve plain flour, corn flour and icing sugar into a large mixing bowl. Set aside.

02. Mix vanilla extract to fresh milk and set aside. (I prepare this mixture first so that I can add this into the dough mixture straight after rubbing in the flour.  Hands would be too oily by then.)

03.  Add the cubed butter into the sieved flour and swiftly rub butter into flour with clean fingertips until mixture resembles yellow bread crumbs.

04. Fingers will be messy with butter and flour.  With a pastry scraper, scrap the bits stuck on fingers back into the bowl.  The butter is too good and expensive to be wasted!

05. Add milk + vanilla mixture, mix with a metal spoon.

06. If the dough appears dry and cannot be formed into a ball, gradually more cold milk, 1 teaspoon at a time until a soft dough ball finally forms.
07. Chill dough in the fridge for 10 – 20 minutes.  This is to make the dough less sticky and easier to handle.  Do not leave it too long in the fridge, otherwise, it will turn into a very hard block when the butter content turns total solid.

08. While the dough is chilling, roll pineapple jam into tiny balls, 8g each, and  arrange them on a plate. But I usually do this shaping step immediately after my pineapple jam has chilled to room temperature after cooking, and store them in an airtight container in the fridge.

09. Remove dough from fridge.  Weigh 12g of dough, and wrap the pineapple jam with it, and roll it into a neat ball.

10. Arrange tarts on baking tray.  Apply eggwash on top.

11. Bake in preheated oven at 150C for 20minutes.

12. Cool completely before storing in an air tight container.

** The homemade jam recipe yield approx 60 x 8g jam balls (depending on how big the pineapples are), so you might want to double this pastry recipe if you want to finish up the pineapple jam.